Apple And Microsoft Completely Disagree About The Future Of Personal Computing

The Apple rumor mill is mainly focused on the iPhone, the iWatch,
and Apple TV.

However, there is persistent, albeit less titillating, gossip
about Apple releasing a new,
category-defining laptop this year. There is also talk of
Apple working on a 12-inch iPad Pro.

We thought there was a chance that these products
were the same thing. We thought maybe Apple was going to go
the Microsoft Surface route and do a laptop-iPad hybrid of some
sort.

We no longer think that.

On the 30th anniversary of the launch of the Mac, Apple
executives made it very clear that they have no interest
whatsoever in creating Surface-like laptop-tablet hybrid.

In
an interview with Macworld, Craig Federighi, who leads Mac
(OS X) and iPhone/iPad (iOS) software engineering said,
"The reason OS X has a different interface than iOS isn’t
because one came after the other or because this one’s old and
this one’s new," it's because the Mac "has been honed over
30 years" to work for keyboards and mice, while the iPhone has
been honed for five years to work for touch.

He says that making a tablet into a laptop is a
mistake: "It’s obvious and easy enough to slap a
touchscreen on a piece of hardware, but is that a good
experience? We believe, no."

Microsoft believes "yes," which
is why it made Windows 8 a touch-centric experience. It decided
to meld the desktop with the touchscreen.

Apple SVP of Marketing, Phil Schiller told MacWorld, "It’s
not an either/or. It’s a world where you’re going to
have a phone, a tablet, a computer, you don’t have to choose. And
so what’s more important is how you seamlessly move between them
all… It’s not like this is a laptop person and that’s a tablet
person. It doesn’t have to be that way."